Dr Hermes Retro-Scans

 Here's yet another classic strip that is largely (and unjustly) forgotten today. ALLEY OOP started in 1933 as the exploits of a roughneck in the antedeluvian kingdom of Moo. Alley's semi-girlfriend Oola and drinking buddy Foozy, the unscrupulous King Guzzle and Grand Wizard all give Alley more trouble than the dinosaurs and sabretooths. Luckily our hero had befriended the loveable Dinny, a Harryhausian Rhedosaurus. The strip was written and drawn by V.T. Hamlin with just the right blend of action, humor and satire. Then in 1939, things took a left turn as Alley and Oola were snatched into the then-present by an experimental time machine invented by Professor Wonmug. After that, it was only occasional visits back to Moo as Alley and Oola visited the fall of Troy, the Wild West, Camelot, New York City (*ack*)...

This strip shows newspaper reporters once again not knowing where to draw the line. Notice the distinct sexual dimorphism of Moo, where the males are odd-looking brutes and the females gorgeous heartbreakers (kind of like Burroughs' Opar or network sitcoms. Alley also seems to be aflicted with Popeye Syndrome, resulting in enlarged forearms and lower legs.

 From 1968, this is Peter Caras' cover to Ted White's novel THE GREAT GOLD STEAL. Why would you need a big logo when you've got Captain America himself on the cover? Caras' painted a stack of paperback covers taller than you are, including the first few Avenger reprints. His Cap is lean, muscular but not bulky... a lot like Simon and Kirby's original interpretation, come to think of it. That shield could stand some polishing, though. For a full commentary, go to DR HERMES REVIEWS
 

 You know, it gladdens me that every single person I've asked immediately prefers Bailey Quarters to Jennifer Marlowe on WKRP IN CINNCINATI. Loni Anderson was played up for years as the irresistable sexy blonde, with that helmet of hair and exaggerated curves. I'm sure a lot of guys did go nuts over her, and yet it's always Jan Smithers' Bailey they remember fondly. The character was intelligent, shy, idealistic, just a good person in general. And Jan was gorgeous in her own sweet way. Every now and then, her subdued wardrobe gave hints of the amazing body beneath. My favorite Bailey Quarters moment was when she sang "Amazing Grace" a capella, very touching. Jan started out modellng, did a movie here and there (WHERE THE LILLIES BLOOM but WKRP was her main contribution to pop culture. These pictures of her are from 1980, look back and smile.

 From the May 1941 issue of BLACK BOOK DETECTIVE, here is a stirring action shot of the Black Bat explaining a citizen's duty to obey society's law for the good of all. Once again, let me refer you to my site DR HERMES REVIEWS for coverage of this story, "The Black Bat and the Red Menace." (It's either that or just repeat everything I said in that review.) You know, this character and DC's Batman premiered at about the same time in 1939, and the publishers let it slide without reaching for their lawyers. There is a certain amount of coincidence in heroic fiction, as writers try to work up some new angles on the basic premises. It's just fortunate that Tony Quinn did not think to fasten some batlike "ears" to the cowl of his costume....

Forrest J Ackerman had a great phrase for movies that never got past the planning stages, he would say they were in "the realm of unwrought things." We all have a film or two that we wish had been made, that we waited for after reading tantalizing press reports and finally sadly accepted years later that we were not going to be seeing BUCKAROO BANZAI AGAINST THE WORLD CRIME LEAGUE or CHILDHOOD'S END or LENSMAN any time soon. Even in the humble but energetic world of Foot To the Head films, there are unwrought things. Around 1970, the success of THE GREEN HORNET TV series in oversea markets and his own difficulty getting anywhere in Hollywood led Bruce Lee to Hong Kong. Here he was well known and he started starring in martial arts movies, beginning with THE BIG BOSS. But he considered a variety of parts. Here are some test shots he did in costume, to see how he would look in historical pieces. That's an iron fan, useful on a muggy day but also good for deflecting knife attacks or breaking a few heads. Lee is shown with a sword, twin daggers, axe and maracas. No, no, no, he is not trying out for the Miami Sound Machine with Gloria Estefan. Those are clubs and if he smacked you with them, you'd hear more than music.

Had Lee lived to middle-age, I suspect he might have turned out to be a respected director. Even with what amounts to a home movie, WAY OF THE DRAGON, he shows a good grasp of comic timing and storytelling. It's a weird thought, but there might have come a day when a 60-year-old Bruce Lee was known as a director who had made some great fighting movies in his younger days.

Let me again plug DR HERMES REVIEWS http://community-2.webtv.net/drhermes/DRHERMESREVIEWSHome/ to say that reviewsof most of the GREEN HORNET episodes can be found there, along with coverage of all of Lee's action movies.

Hey there! Welcome to Retro-Scans. I'm posting scans of vintage crazy stuff that hopefully has not been over-exposed. Art from old pulps and comics, paperback covers; ads and stills from whacko movies and TV; and pictures of babes of yore. Updates are frequent, so check back often. Comment here or e-mail me at drhermes@webtv.net. I love getting mail, who doesn't.

You may want to look over my main website DR HERMES REVIEWS 
http://community-2.webtv.net/drhermes/DRHERMESREVIEWSHome/
There you will find hundreds and hundreds of reviews of pulp novels, cliffhangers, old time radio shows,  black & white horror films and drive-in classics, great stuff the likes of which you don't find these days.

I am also posting esoteric comic posts over at scans_daily, a lively and unruly comm that you should visit.

 This fine painting appeared in a 1972  issue of ESQUIRE, and if anyone can identify the artist, I'd love to learn who did it. This accompanied a lengthy "Interview with Lord Greystoke" by Philip Jose Farmer, presented in question and answer form. Farmer was going through a phase of intense Pulp-mania during the 1970s. He wrote the biographies TARZAN ALIVE and DOC SAVAGE: HIS APOCALYPTIC LIFE; he did some bizarre X-rate underground novels with his own versions of the characters, A FEAST UNKNOWN and the less lurid THE MAD GOBLIN and LORD OF THE TREES. Farmer batted out a number of pastiches of varying quality, and he ended up writing two new authorized books about the heroes he obsessed over the most -- THE DARK HEART OF TIME starring Tarzan and Doc Savage's WWI adventure, ESCAPE FROM LOKI. Again, all this stuff is covered over at DR HERMES REVIEWS website; maybe I should just note when one of the scans here has not been reviewed on my site.

As I mentioned before, I never reviewed the Modesty Blaise books because a British lad calling himself Stiletto Blade did such a fine job that I felt I couldn't add anything. His website has long been taken down, but his reviews of Modesty Blaise (and Bulldog Drummond, Sexton Blake and other greats) are archived on Usenet, through a two-second Google search. Check them out. Personally, I have read the Modesty Blaise books until the covers fell off, and the same for the half-dozen albums reprinting the comic strip. So I was stricken by the 1967 film as if a familiar concert album by a favorite group suddenly turned into something by Alvin and the Chipmunks. I'm sure there are those who enjoy the film as a brazen romp. Just about every movie you hate has people who adore it, that's the way of the world. But when I think of our Modesty and Willie, fighting off a gang while singing a duet about they've never had sex.....*ack!* Anyway I'm not going to review the movie here. It's been many years (Never you mind just how many) since I last saw and I'm not afire with eagerness to rent it again. I just thought this shot of Monica Vitta in the title role was worth a peek. She does look a lot like Modesty -- not built like her, true -- and if the movie had been well crafted with a better attitude, she might have done well in the part. Ah well, the books and the strip are still there, unharmed by any adaptations, waiting patiently to be read again.

 This is from June 1967, an Avengers novel by Otto Binder that is so atrocious it'll make your hands smell bad after reading it. There's more detailed coverage over at DR HERMES REVIEWS 
http://community-2.webtv.net/drhermes/DRHERMESREVIEWSHome/. Right here, I'll just point out that the cover swipes the wavy logo, the dramatically lit figures against a black background and even the pose from THE MAN OF BRONZE, Bantam's reprint of the first Doc Savage story. The cover by James Bama is iconic, it's been made available as a poster. Here, Robert McGinnis seems to be seeing if he can get Doc fans to pick this up and get halfway to the checkout counter before they realize what they're buying. McGinnis painted all the seductive lovelies on 1950s paperback mysteries about Shell Scott, Carter Brown and Mike Shayne and it shows here in his treatment of the Scarlet Witch. There's not much good I can say about this book.

 Now, Catherine Deneuve may have looked angelic and sweet, but she made some freaky movies. As usual, i am not particularly interested in the artistic, high-minded sophisticated time-wasters that win prestige and critical acclaim. Nope, I like Catherine because she starred in Roman Pelanski's REPULSION, where she goes through a psychotic episode right onscreen and not even the likeable actors are certain to make it to the end credits. Then she did BELLE DU JOUR (GIRL MAKING SOUP, no wait, that's not right... ah, GIRL OF THE DAY). Here she played a beautiful spoiled housewife who every day volunteers to work at a bordello catering to borderline tastes. Or is it all her daydreaming fantasy? I can tell, you this it was a daydream fantasy for a lot of people watching that film. Whew. Then there was THE HUNGER, where she played a bisexual vampire messing around with David Bowie and Susan Sarandon. My friends tell me that movie makes estrogen surge like a dam breaking. From what I gather, Catherine in active in many fine causes and has used her fame and wealth to do good. I'm glad and applaud her enlightenment, but those three movies would be enough to make me glad to see that lovely face materialize onscreen. 

Whew, where do I start with this one? Let's see, it was one of a series of "Three Supermen" movies made in Italy in the 1970s. This is THREE SUPERMEN AGAINST THE ORIENT from 1973, even though it sure looks like more than three costumed avengers right there. The two Chinese actors (who are the only ones not wearing masks) are Lo Lieh, made immortal by his nuanced performances in FIVE FINGERS OF DEATH and THE STRANGER AND THE GUNFIGHTER with Lee Van Cleef; next to him is Shih Szu who appeared in a whole mess of kung fu flicks from Hong Kong's golden age of Foot To the Head. The other three are Sal Borgese, Robert Ross and Cantafora, which is all the information I have on them.

Be honest, if you saw this at Blockbuster Video, would you rent it? Of course.

So cool you can hardly stand it. I would love to see this sequence in live action if they make another Shadow movie. (With Adrien Brody, you guys) This is a 1972 promotional piece by Mike Kaluta for the Shadow series that DC was about to publish.

It's 1934 and the hordes of the Purple Empire have America on the verge of collapse. Cities are burning, hundreds of thousands have died, enemy soldiers roam the countryside. Our only hope is our top secret agent, Jimmy Christopher... Operator# 5. But before he leaps into action, Jimmy takes a page or two to describe a magic trick to his young pal Tim.

And if you think I'm making this up, you need to read more pulp.

This was an updated and (cough) improved version of Wonder Woman that aired on ABC in 1974. Reportedly, it did all right and response was good but the decision to go with the more traditional look for the ongoing series prevailed. And so we got the classic Lynda Carter in the star-spangled swimsuit and golden lasso. (Perfect casting.) Not that there was anything wrong with Cathy Lee Crosby in any noticeable way... she was tall, athletic and gorgeous in her own way. (She was often soaking wet on THAT'S INCREDIBLE with astonishing results). She just wasn't suited to be the character as we know it.

This is going from memory. My mind fades, the visions dim, all I have are fragments... Anyway, Cathy was indeed an Amazon princess from a mystical island of warrior women. (Scenes there were fuzzy and out of focus to show how magical it all was.) She came to the real world to get in trouble and fight for justice, but she settles for arresting Ricard Montalban. I recall a quarterstaff fight with renegade Amazon Anitra Ford (who would have made a really interesting Wonder Woman!) that was sadly lame. The invisible plane was mentioned but not shown. And as he is taken to start breaking rocks in the hot sun, Montalban smiles graciously and says, "Wonder Woman, I love you."

Gag, choke, reel. I haven't checked to see if clips from this are up on YouTube because I want these commentaries to be fresh from my own opinions, rather than just restating what other people say. If I look there and there are scenes from the 1974 pile-up that actually seem pretty good, I'll come back and add some revisions.  

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*I'm back. Looks like a stinkfest. That 1970s undulating siren theme song is atrocious and Cathy Lee sadly doesn't look as attractive as I remember her. But the new costume, red tunic with blue sleeves and leggings isn't bad. A lot of Wonder Woman fans aren't happy with her flag/swimsuit costume, anyway.

This is British actress Jacqueline Bisset in all her glory. In her day, she was a hark back to the more glamorous full-bodied stars of an earlier time. Jackie was actually talented at her craft -- catch her in DAY FOR NIGHT * to see some class acting. But I liked some of the goofier films she made (well, I would). WHO IS KILLING THE GREAT CHEFS OF EUROPE (a dark comedy) and THE MEPHISTO WALTZ (an occult thriller). Despite her many well-acclaimed performances and her appearing in films like BULLIT, Jacqueline Bisset will likely be instantly remembered for THE DEEP. This was a decent suspense film, what with his attack moray and gorgeous underwater photography, good performances by Robert Shaw and Nick Nolte. But Jackie lives on in the memories of those who saw her skin-diving in a thin white T-shirt. Her scenes.. looking for treasure or.. I'm sorry, my mind wandered. 

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*For the longest time, I thought this was some subtle French slang but it's really the familiar cinema phrase for shooting in daylight and making it seem like nighttime, day for night. D'oh!

S From 1952, this is the third of Sax Rohmer's five novels starring his arch-villain Sumuru. (I never get tired of putting in a recommendation to check out DR HERMES REVIEWS http://community-2.webtv.net/drhermesDRHERMESREVIEWSHome/ but honestly the Sumuru and all the Fu Manchu books are reviewed there in detail. All I'll say here is that this series was a dud, like a barbeque on a rainy day that no one shows up for. I kept thinking that something interesting was bound to happen, but no. THE FIRE GODDESS reads like a thriller that someone went through and edited all the good parts out of. Pfui. The cover illustrates part of Sumuru's lurid and rather pointless rituals, in which as lucious young woman stands in a raging face and is not harmed in the slightest.. but her clothes are burned completely off. It makes no sense and isn't explained beyond "a trick of some sort" but it does lend itself to eye-catching cover art.

Now, Steve Ditko left the best-selling Spider-Man title mostly because he was tired of doing the plotting without getting full credit, and because he didn't like the way Stan Lee used dialogue and narration to change the direction of what Ditko had intended. Fair enough. This was also Jack  Kirby's main gripe against Lee and "the Marvel method." But have you ever read the stuff that Steve Ditko started to turn out without Stan Lee to  rein him in. *ack!* Ditko was a believer in Ayn Rand's objectivism and it quickly turned his output from super-hero or mystery comics to jaw-dropping sermons.

This from 1973's black and white one-shot, AVENGING WORLD, published by Bruce Hershenson. This page is actually one of the more accessible ones, as it features actual characters interacting. Most of AVENGING WORLD is full page poster art, with huge solid blocks of indigestible moralizing. The main character IS the world, a literal globe with eyes and mouth, usually shown with a bandage to represent the damage done by people not seeing everything in uncompromising good or evil. I really can't start to describe Ditko's agenda here, because it would take a lengthy essay to refute his obfuscations. 

Anyway, just imagine Stan Lee sitting at his desk with a five o'clock deadline and trying to write dialogue for this art. At what point does he have a stroke?

This is a neat formal portrait from THE GOLDEN MAN (in DOC SAVAGE for April 1941). Paul Orban does a fine job capturing the six long-time friends. (They met in WW I and were still seeing each other in 1949.) Doc Savage and his Five are problem for illustrators; they are described so vividly and so unrealistically over 182 books that putting their likenesses down on paper is unlikely to satisfy all their fans. I could post about thirty different versions of these guys, some pretty true to description and some way off base. The 1974 Doc movie starring Ron Ely screwed things up for some of the comic book interpretations, giving Renny bushy  sideburns and Ham a thin gigolo mustache, neither of which suits the guys. Monk has been shown as a variety of freaks, ranging from a simple tough mug to a Neanderthal to a hormonal monster. The version here is decent. I like the way Long Tom is shot and narrow-shouldered and having Renny put his distinctive giant fists in his pockets is genius. Ham is not hard to get right, and Johnny is easy enough, with his boniness and monocle; the longish hair on Johnny was in fact mentioned in the texts.

As for Doc himself, fans remain divided. The conflict is over his hair. The pulp covers and interior art showed the bronze man with a normal enough haircut, including a lock that seems to be always unruly over his right temple (kind of like James Bond's "comma" of hair that Fleming described). But the stories themselves described Doc has having hair that lies down sleek and flat as a skullcap. In some of the stories, he is in fact wearing an armored skullcap with hair on top of it, which adds to the image. When James Bama began painting covers to the paperback reprints in 1964, he gave Doc what amounts to a costume: riding boots, jodhpurs and a torn-up white shirt with one sleeve still attached at a wrist. And he gave Doc sleek, short hair with a pointed widow's-peak. A lot of classic pulp fans dislike that widow's peak, but (just speaking personally) it's what I grew up with and it's imprinted in my reading DNA by this point. Whether or not it's true to the pulp art, it has become a visual trademark of the character and I have no problem with it.

 It's BRENDA SCOTT. She was a lovely little actress, just look at that face. What a heartbreaker. In the dim mists of prehistory that were the 1970s, Brenda was one of those actors who turned up every single week. THE VIRGINIAN, MEDICAL CENTER, IRONSIDE,  MANNIX, HERE COME THE BRIDES, THE MOD SQUAD... if you went around the dial those days, you would likely see Brenda Scott as a young runaway or a bride with some rare blood disorder or a witness to a murder or a singer for some rock band. There she was. Brenda also appeared in the 1971 movie SIMON, KING OF THE WITCHES which was so over the top and cheesy I want Joel and the bots to reunite just to cover it. You also get a nude scene with Brenda, which highlights something as rare in films today as a square circle, real women's breasts as nature made them. How novel.  Brenda, if you're out there, well into your 60s by now, you should know you have not been entirely forgotten; and considering how many series are out on DVD, someone right this minute is watching an old episode and thinking, "Say, she's cute!"

 From 1957, this was the first of eleven Honey West books by the Ficklings, a husband and wife writing team. The books are well okay, nothing great and nothing you'd want to track down. It's Mamie Van Doran with a P.I. license. See my website 
http://community-2.webtv.net/drhermes/DRHERMESREVIEWSHome/ for fuller coverage. Honey inherits her father's detective agency and solves cases by having the authors on her side. She is partially or completely naked every few chapters and has some funny ideas about crime and criminals. To be honest, Honey will be best remembered for the 1965 TV series starring Anne Francis and an ocelot. Several complete episodes of HONEY WEST are up on YouTube and deserve a look. My question is, isn't it way past time for a Honey West movie?
You bet your sweet integrity it is.